Now for today. (Yesterday was a travel day from Nairobi to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, riddled with visa, email and hotel room challenges I won't bore you with.) My coworker and I are attending the "Building Resilience for Food and Nutrition Security" conference hosted by IFPRI, the International Food Policy Research Institute. It's a huge conference with a lot of the worlds prominent thinkers. We were excited LWR got an invite. I was expecting it to be a snooze fest- a lot of talking in circles maybe, in business suits. First time I've ever brought stockings and heels on a business trip to Africa, by the way. (I ended up not wearing the stockings). We were excited for the networking and visibility opportunity- set me loose in a room and I can talk anyone's head off. But from the first session this morning, I was energized, and furiously jotting ideas and notes, and never once nodded off despite barely sleeping last night. I won't get into all my reflections, that will be pages and pages shared back w my colleagues, but suffice to say that in this difficult world, there are a lot of great things in motion to improve it- already showing a lot of improvement. I didn't even mind the end of the day- a THREE hour plenary from 5pm to 8pm including 20- yes 20- speakers. (Ok the last hour sorta lost all of us). But for example, the head of the World Food Program (WFP), a woman named Etharin Cousin, knocked my socks off with her speech. Who knew?!? The President of Ethiopia was also a distinguished speaker so that was also very cool. I also had the chance earlier to sit with people from other organizations also working on gender integration like we are, and we're planning to come together for a few days to swap notes and maybe build a larger consortium for learning. Super jazzed about that!
20 more minutes and off to a business dinner...a long but exciting day.
No comments:
Post a Comment